Defining 'Born Again'

The phrase "born again" conjures a variety of images--straight and clean-cut young people handing out tracts on street corners, sudden revelations, a provincial team spirit for God with a sprinkling of busybodiness.

Jimmy Carter says he's born again. Journalists have written about his religion and speculated as to how it affects him and evokes the image he projects. But they have shied away from defining what born again means.

Carter says he entered into a dynamic born again experience after he lost the 1966 gubernatorial race in Georgia. The defeat left him wondering what he was to do and where he was going. He said that his personal relationship with God through the born again experience offered him meaning, at what appears to have been a breaking point in his life.

The born again event occurs when one accepts God's forgiveness for his sins through Christ's atonement on the cross. One then enters a new life, in which he relates to God and his associates in a spirit of love.

It is an emotional experience, for the concepts of forgiveness and love have extensive impact that people who have been born again feel reach cords in the human psyche that few experiences in life can touch. A change in lifestyle can occur because of the very strength of the truth one has apprehended and applied to his life.

Although Carter was raised in the Southern Baptist church, he consciously chose a personal relationship with God a decade ago.

Carter rejects efforts to circumscribe his spiritual experience by simply relegating it to the Southern Baptist tradition. He said, "I'm a human being. I'm not a packaged article that you can put in a little box and say here's a Southern Baptist...he's got to be predictable."

Carter's so-called "hotline" to God through prayer appears to be his working relationship with the non-material world. According to the Democrats' press aide Mark Cohen, Carter reads the Bible (in Spanish) every night. He is thereby working to maintain a continuous connection with God, the aide says. Carter's spiritual experience gives him a "sense of peace and equanimity and assurance," he says.

William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience quotes Louis Agassiz as saying, "One can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in." James's book is based on interviews with people who have had a spectrum of religious experiences.

The following is in a similar format. The individuals interviewed have intimate knowledge of the born again phenomenon, through association with Eastern Nazarene College or Barrington College, two schools in the New England area that encourage the tradition of the born again experience.

The interviewees describe the born again encounter, and some offer comments on Carter as a presidential nominee who comes from a born again religious tradition.

Harvey Cox, Thomas Professor of Divinity and a member of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, says that Jesus did not necessarily introduce the idea of rebirth, for a rebirth practice can be found throughout preliterate tribal religious groups in Australia and Africa.

In these civilizations, at puberty, boys are taken from their mothers and placed in isolation in a womb-like situation in a tent. After many days they are pulled out by their heads through their fathers' legs. At this recapitulation of the original birth experience, they babble like babies. But soon afterward they are given weapons of adult men to signify that they are ready after their second birth to accept the responsibilities of adult life.

Cox referred to "born again" as an experience rather than an institutional affiliation. But the words become conventionalized, he says. They function as a code with overtones. They are, like an evocation, symbol-suffused. As with the symbolic communion in the Catholic church, vibrations reverberate around the term, Cox says. Included in those vibrations is the question, are you serious about your religion--is it personal?

Cox said that Hamilton Jordan, Carter's national campaign director, comes from a radical New Testament background in the South. His father, Clarence Jordan, was a radical populist and Southern Baptist, who started a farm called Koinonia (the Greek New Testament word for community) in Americas, Georgia. This farm was an inter-racial co-operative group with emphasis on pacifism.

Cox mentions the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, another populist group in the Southern tradition from which Carter has emerged. That group was a tenant and farmer organization that the Southern Baptists and Presbyterians formed many decades ago. Cox says they were "swimming against the stream of racism" and prejudice against poor whites long before that became a popular middle class Northern cause.

Reverend Paulanne Balch is also a member of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church and is a graduate of Andover-Newton School. She is presently a chaplain at Mt. Auburn Hospital. She says that "born again" is the experience of psychic birth marked by a profound sense of self-recognition and participation in one's life and culture. There is an acknowledgment of the condition of one's life and an experience of pain connected with the loss of illusions. Then a descent, a letting go. Finally, she adds, there's a resurrection where the body is healed; "the scales fall from the eyes," and one is no longer confined by the old ways of seeing things. The growth process can then begin.

She says it is similar to psychotherapy, because the person is willing to face herself, and is committed to liberating herself for a healthier, freer life. In the midst of contradictory, alienating experiences, a surrender makes possible a deeper unity in living.

Balch found that this spiritual break-through implements a sort of mind expansion whereby one no longer needs to define his life by the limitations of his past. He is born into his inner world and finds there the potential to become what he wants to be.

Of course, she says, the individual decides whether she will use the experience to relate to her social and political milieu or provincially shut out her neighbor from her private experience.

She believes that the born again experience energizes hope in one's life. She suggests that Carter's born again encounter possibly unlocked that hope in him, which, combined with drive and ambition, has facilitated his political ascent in the last five years.

Jean Mullen, who has taught at Eastern Nazarene College, compares the steps in conversion with the Alcoholics Anonymous program in which one admits she's helpless and can't help herself. That's the beginning of being able to face onself and be healed, she says.

She says one exposes the wrongs of his past and basically clears up the record when he accepts pardon from God through faith. She says that baptism, an integral part of the Southern Baptist church, symbolizes the old life being cleansed and the new emerging.

Mullen has a born again experience that involves a communication with God through prayer, in which she tries to be open to God's "nudges" or direction. She does not expect miraculous changes in her life, but rather a developing awareness of the right timing and a sensitivity to others' attitudes and feelings.

She said she believes that the ability to know when to enact social reforms depends on that type of timing. If the people are ready for a reform and pushing for it, a president who has been reborn can sense that the social climate is ready for new legislation.

Mullen, however, is uncertain if Carter is actually in tune with the people, although he does show concern for the unemployed. But she views him as humanistic, and would expect him to be an honest president, rather than a scoundrel.

Reverend Jack Daniel, associate minister of youth and education at First Parish Church in Westwood, calls the born again experience a touchstone. It is the beginning of faith, an overwhelmingly real metaphysical and psychological experience that lends a feeling of zeal and confidence to one's life.

He speaks of the new dimension of life that is opened by being born again. The change is just as radical as the baby moving from the uterus environment to the air-breathing environment. One is shaken to the roots of his life; he finds a whole new orientation.

Daniel correlates the Second Great Awakening, a period of spiritual revivalism in the early 1800s, with social movements. At that time revival leaders encouraged the establishing of institutions like many schools, hospitals, orphanages, and homes for unwed mothers.

Steven Green, a member of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Watertown, converted from Judaism to Christianity after researching Christ's teachings. He says he knows God through being born again, in a way that is comparable to falling in love.

Green says that knowing and loving the Creator of the Universe changes his perspective on the scheme of things, and that out of that love naturally grows a commitment to serve God.

Green expects Carter to be more populist than corporate in his interests as a born again Christian. Since the Bible teaches compassion and that all are created in God's image, Green says he would expect a born again president to try and deal fairly with the needs of all people.

Careyleah MacLeod, who attended Eastern Nazarene College, says that she was raised in a Northern Baptist church that taught conversion, but that she had a blinding born again type of experience in her early twenties, through the use of drugs (LSD). At that time, the "cobwebs" were cleared from her head, and her thinking and perception became clearer. This experience represented to her a culmination of spiritual quests. She recognized the beginning of a new lifestyle, which is more in tune with the way she wants to live and interact with others.

MacLeod admires Carter for being honest enough to say he is born again. She says institutional sin exists on a large scale, and there's no individual to take responsibility or feel the guilt. Carter wants to make the American people believe he is morally responsible; he is direct about that, she says.

What makes better sense, she says, than an upright and moral Baptist to appeal to the Republicans who can't respond to the Republican Party because of the institutional sin that Ford just swept under the rug?

Kenneth Clauser, who teaches at Barrington College, regards "born again" as a catch-all phrase, almost a cliche in Fundamentalist church circles, that can result in a cliched experience because the words lose their meaning.

He calls someone who has a personal relationship with the historical Christ a born again Christian. This person accepts the New Testament vision of Christ as a pattern for his life. If followed carefully, a radical lifestyle can emerge. Some of the New Testament calls for change in the social order. Christ spoke in behalf of the oppressed and poor, the social outcasts. He was not a "corporation man" but a radical figure, Clauser says